nd
is the mistress of it."

Audrey jumped up, smiling, and lifting her veil. She could not help
smiling. The studio, the lamp, Rosamund with her miraculous
self-complacency, Nick with her soft, mad eyes and wistful voice, the
blundering ruthless Miss Ingate, all seemed intensely absurd to her.
Everything seemed absurd except dancing and revelry and coloured lights and
strange disguises and sensuous contacts. She had the most careless
contempt, stiffened by a slight loathing, for political movements and every
melancholy effort to reform the world. The world did not need reforming and
did not want to be reformed.

"Perhaps you don't know my story," Audrey began, not realising how she
would continue. "I am a widow. I made an unhappy marriage. My husband on
the day after our wedding-day began to eat peas with his knife. In a week I
was forced to leave him. And a fortnight later I heard that he was dead of
blood-poisoning. He had cut his mouth."

And she thought:

"What is the matter with me? I have ruined myself." All her exultation had
collapsed.

But Rosamund remarked gravely:

"It is a common story."

Suddenly there was a movement in the obscure corner where sat the unnamed
and unintroduced lady. This lady rose and came towards the table. She was
very elegant in dress and manner, and she looked maturely young.

"Madame Piriac," announced Rosamund.

Audrey recoiled.... Gazing hard at the face, she saw in it a vague but
undeniable resemblance to certain admired photographs which had arrived at
Moze from France.

"Pardon me!" said Madame Piriac in English with a strong French accent. "I
shall like very much to hear the details of this story of _petits pois_."
The tone of Madame Piriac's question was unexceptionable; it took account
of Audrey's mourning attire, and of her youthfulness; but Audrey could
formulate no answer to it. Instead of speaking she gave a touch to her
veil, and it dropped before her piquant, troubled, inscrutable face like a
screen.

Miss Ingate said with noticeable calm, but also with the air of a
conspirator who sees danger to a most secret machination:

"I'm afraid Mrs. Moncreiff won't care to go into details."

It was neatly done. Madame Piriac brought the episode to a close with a
sympathetic smile and an apposite gesture. And Audrey, safe behind her
veil, glanced gratefully and admiringly at Miss Ingate, who, taken quite
unawares, had been so surprisingly able thus to get her out o